Date: April 25th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Benjamin Bushong

Paper Title: “Heterogeneous Tastes and Social (Mis)Learning”, with Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch (Florida State University)

Abstract: How do people learn from others’ actions when those people may have differing tastes? We present data from two experiments in which properly extracting information from other people’s actions requires an observer to account for how her predecessors’ tastes may have influenced those actions. We find support for social learning that obeys some basic comparative statics predicted by the rational model. However, we also find significant and systematic departures. Participants seemingly over-infer from others’ behavior when that behavior is weakly predictive of the underlying state and under-infer from others when their behavior is strongly predictive. This pattern of inferences is consistent with participants holding inaccurate beliefs about others where they over-weight the likelihood that others have tastes similar to their own. Information about others’ tastes does not eliminate these biases in inferences.

Bio: Ben Bushong is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Economics whose recent research examines how cognitive biases and erroneous social beliefs influence both decision-making and our interactions with others. His broader research lies in the intersection of psychology and economics — also known as behavioral economics — and has appeared in the American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies, and Neuron. Prior to coming to Michigan State University, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University and before that he worked with the Department of Defense. Professor Bushong holds a Ph.D. in Social Science (Economics) from the inimitable Caltech.

Date: April 4th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Björn Bartling

Paper Title: “Paternalistic Interventions: Determinants of Demand and Supply”, with Krishna Srinivasan (University of Zurich)

Abstract: People sometimes engage in behaviors that negatively impact their well-being, creating opportunities for paternalistic interventions by governments, experts, or parents. Our study explores when and why individuals choose to intervene to enhance someone else’s welfare. Additionally, we investigate when and why individuals seek out paternalistic interventions. We conducted an experiment with a general population sample in the U.S. to examine the role of freedom of choice, rights to consent, confidence, and trust in shaping attitudes towards paternalistic interventions. A better understanding of these attitudes can contribute to the design of more effective policies.

Bio:

Björn Bartling is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich and Vice Chairman of the Department of Economics. In his research, he uses empirical methods to study the impact of social and moral motivations in economic contexts. 

Professor Bartling is also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) – The Choice Lab, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of the European Economic Association and for Management Science.

Date: May 2nd, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker:  Salvatore Nunnari

Paper Title: “Cognitive Skills and the Demand for Bad Policy” with Eugenio Proto (University of Glasgow) and Aldo Rustichini (University of Minnesota)

Abstract: Theories of voting behavior are based on the assumption that citizens accurately assess the comparative advantages of the available policy options. However, many policies produce outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects, such as lifting price controls, expanding or constructing roads, implementing Pigouvian taxes, and monetizing fiscal deficits. The average citizen might not fully appreciate these equilibrium effects, leading to misjudgments about the efficacy of certain policies. Recent research by Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Eyster (2018) demonstrates that individuals often vote against policies that, despite imposing direct costs, would resolve social dilemmas and enhance overall welfare. This raises an important research question: How do cognitive abilities influence the formation of preferences over policies? Specifically, what is the underlying mechanism? Our study proposes a simple theoretical framework and an experimental approach to explore a potential pathway and shows that greater cognitive skills and more optimistic beliefs about the cognitive skills of other citizens lead to greater demand for good policies.

Bio:

Salvatore Nunnari is Associate Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and Research Fellow at CEPR and CESifo. He earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and has previously served as Assistant Professor at UCSD and Columbia University. At Bocconi, he is also the Co-Director of the Bocconi Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences and the Director of the B.Sc. in Economic and Social Sciences. His research focuses on political economy, behavioral economics, experimental economics, and microeconomic theory, and it has been published in top general interest journals such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, the American Political Science Review, and the American Journal of Political Science. Nunnari recently received a European Research Council grant for a five-year project on the “Behavioral Foundations of Populism and Polarization” and is a member of the editorial board for PSRM, the Journal of the European Political Science Association.

Date: March 14th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Leeat Yariv

Paper Title: “The Dynamics of Networks and Homophily” with Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford University), Stephen M. Nei (University of Exeter), and Erik Snowberg (University of Utah)

Abstract: We examine friendships and study partnerships among university students over several years. At the aggregate level, connections increase over time, but homophily on gen- der and ethnicity is relatively constant across time, university residences, and different network layers. At the individual level, homophilous tendencies are persistent across time and network layers. Furthermore, we see assortativity in homophilous tendencies. There is weaker, albeit significant, homophily over malleable characteristics—risk pref- erences, altruism, study habits, and so on. We find little evidence of assimilation over those characteristics. We also document the nuanced impact of network connections on changes in Grade Point Average.

Bio:

Leeat Yariv is the Uwe E. Reinhardt Professor of Economics at Princeton University, a research fellow of CEPR, and a research associate of NBER. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held positions at UCLA and Caltech prior to her move to Princeton in 2017, where she is the founder and director of the Princeton Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences (PExL). Yariv’s research focuses on political economy, market design, social and economic networks, and experimental economics.

Currently, Yariv is the lead editor of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.^[1] She has served on various journal editorial boards, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Literature, and Quantitative Economics.

Yariv is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Date: March 28th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Maria Abascal

Paper Title: “Diversity and Prosocial Behavior Across NYC Neighborhoods: Evidence from a Lost Wallet Experiment” with Shannon Rieger (NYU) and Delia Baldassarri (NYU)

Abstract: How is prosocial behavior toward strangers affected by context? Urban scholars have traditionally emphasized the detrimental role of socioeconomic deprivation and physical and social disorder. Recent work has shifted attention to ethnoracial diversity. However, design and data limitations curb the inferential capacity of previous studies, especially with respect to the negative effect of ethnoracial diversity on prosocial behavior. We use a lost wallet experiment to improve on past studies by (1) sampling neighborhoods in order to distinguish ethnoracial heterogeneity from minority share and socioeconomic status, and (2) specifying the intended target of prosocial behavior, which we accomplish by experimentally manipulating the race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and prosocial inclination of the wallet owner. Roughly 1,860 wallets were distributed in 62 purposively sampled NYC neighborhoods in the spring of 2023. We find that ethnoracial diversity is weakly positively related to return attempts, whereas observed neighborhood disorder and socioeconomic deprivation are negatively related to return attempts. Recipients from different ethnoracial and socioeconomic backgrounds are neither more nor less likely to elicit return attempts, but recipients who exhibit a prosocial inclination themselves elicit more such attempts. Our findings underscore the importance of the contextual factors highlighted by a rich tradition of urban research while casting doubt on the provocative claim that ethnoracial diversity per se undermines prosocial behavior. 

Bio:

Maria Abascal is an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University, and completed a postdoc in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.

Broadly, she is interested in intergroup relations and boundary processes, especially as they pertain to race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Most of her research explores the impact of demographic diversification—real and perceived—on intergroup relations in the United States. She draws on a range of quantitative methods and data sources, including original lab, survey, and field experiments.

Ongoing projects examine the relationship between racial/ethnic diversity and cooperation, boundary-drawing in the wake of diversification, and lay understandings of “diversity.”

Date: April 4th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Björn Bartling

Paper Title: “Free to Fail? Paternalistic Preferences in the United States” with Alexander Cappelen (Norwegian School of Economics), Henning Hermes (info Institute Munich), Marit Skivenes (University of Bergen) and Bertil Tungodden (NHH)

Abstract: We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about their choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the stakeholders’ own preferences. We find causal evidence for the nature of the intervention being of great importance for the spectators’ willingness to intervene. Only a minority of the spectators implement a hard intervention that removes the stakeholder’s freedom to choose, while a large majority implement a soft intervention that provides information without restricting the choice set. This finding holds regardless of the stakeholder’s responsibility for being mistaken about the choice set – whether the source of mistake is internal or external – and in different subgroups of the population. We introduce a theoretical framework with two paternalistic types – libertarian paternalists and welfarists – and show that the two types can account for most of the spectator behavior. We estimate that about half of the spectators are welfarists and that about a third are libertarian paternalists. Our results shed light on attitudes toward paternalistic policies and the broad support for soft interventions.

Bio:

Björn Bartling is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich and Vice Chairman of the Department of Economics. In his research, he uses empirical methods to study the impact of social and moral motivations in economic contexts. 

Professor Bartling is also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) – The Choice Lab, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of the European Economic Association and for Management Science.

Date: April 11th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Shachar Kariv

Paper Title: “The Predictivity and Falsifiability of Theories of Choice Under Uncertainty” with with  Keaton Ellis (UC Berkeley), and Erkut Ozbay, (University of Maryland)

Abstract: Economic models are founded on parsimony and interpretability, which is achieved through axioms on choice behavior. We empirically evaluate the predictive accuracy of economic models of choice under risk and ambiguity, and the strength of their axiomatic foundations, using complementary methods of completeness (Fudenberg et al., 2022) and restrictiveness (Fudenberg et al., 2023), respectively. To better understand the tradeoff between the two concepts, we additionally relate their performance to machine learning models. We use budgetary choice environments with three dimensions to provide a strong test of axioms. We show that adding a third dimension of choice marginally reduces completeness of economic models, but significantly increases restrictiveness. Economic models are also more complete than machine learning models, and are significantly more restrictive. These results are robust to considering an environment of choice under ambiguity than choice under risk.

Bio:

Shachar Kariv is a Benjamin N. Ward Professor of Economics. He was educated at Tel Aviv University and New York University, where he received my Ph.D. in economics in 2003, the same year he joined the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been the Department Chair (2014-17 and 2021-22) the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory (2009-2014), aka Xlab, a laboratory for conducting experiment-based investigations of issues of interest to social sciences.  

Shachar was a visiting member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (2005-6), a visiting professor at the European University Institute (2008), a visiting fellow at Nuffield Collegeof the University of Oxford (2009), a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya (2011-12), and a visiting professor at the Department of Economics at Stanford University (2014). I am also a visiting professor (Professor II) at the Department of Economics at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics where he is affiliated with the Choice Lab.

Shachar is also the recipient of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching (2012), the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award (2008), and the Graduate Economics Association Outstanding Advising Award (2006). And was also awarded NYU College of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award (Golden Dozen) in recognition of excellence in teaching and contributions to undergraduate education (2002) and NYU Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award in the Social Sciences (2001). For his Ph.D. dissertation at NYU, he received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2003), and was also awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for Economics (2009-10).

Date: April 18th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Andrew Gelman

Paper Title: “How large is that treatment effect, really?”

Abstract: “Unbiased estimates” aren’t really unbiased, for a bunch of reasons, including aggregation, selection, extrapolation, and variation over time.  Econometrics typically focus on causal identification, with this goal of estimating “the” effect.  But we typically care about individual effects (not “Does the treatment work?” but “Where and when does it work?” and “Where and when does it hurt?”).  Estimating individual effects is relevant not only for individuals but also for generalizing to the population.  For example, how do you generalize from an A/B test performed on a sample right now to possible effects on a different population in the future?  Thinking about variation and generalization can change how we design and analyze experiments and observational studied.  We demonstrate with examples in social science and public health.

Bio:

Andrew Gelman (PhD, Harvard, 1990) is Higgins Professor of Statistics, Professor of Political Science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of forty.

Professor Gelman’s research spans a wide range of topics, including why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City; the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that one vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in home basements; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.

Date: November 30th, 2023 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Marie Claire Villeval

Paper Title: “Selective Information Sharing and Group Delusion”

Abstract: Although in many situations groups make better decisions than individuals, groups also often make mistakes. We investigate experimentally one possible source
of sub-optimal decision-making by groups: the selective and asymmetric sharing of ego-relevant information among team members. We show that good news about
one’s performance is shared more often with team members than bad news. The biased information sharing within teams, together with selection neglect by the
receivers, induces higher team confidence compared to an unbiased exchange of performance feedback. As a result, weak teams end up making worse investment
decisions in a bet whose success depends on the team ability. The endogenous social exchange of ego-relevant information may thus lead to detrimental group delusion.

Bio: Marie Claire Villeval’s main research interests are behavioral and experimental economics applied to the analysis of incentives, social norms, ethics and dishonesty, motivated beliefs and biases in the transmission of information. She is Research Professor at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the head of GATE-Lab at the University of Lyon, France. She is the Past-President of the Economic Science Association (ESA) and the founding President of the French association of experimental economics (ASFEE). She is a Fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) and a member of the Academia Europaea, IZA and GLO. She has been awarded the Silver Medal of CNRS in 2017. She is Department Editor at Management Science.